Effort vs usefulness of pdf, was: proposal to omit pdf generation of reference manual

Kostas Oikonomou writes:
 > As far as hyperlinks in PDF go, I have found that the 
 > following commands work very well in the preamble of a LaTEX 
 > document (I maintain a large set of interlinked PDF 
 > documents made from LaTeX at work):
 > 
 > ...
 > \usepackage{xr-hyper}  % cross-document links!  Must appear 
 > before hyperref!
 > ...
 > \usepackage[hypertex,colorlinks=true,linkcolor=blue,filecolor=webgreen,extension=dvi]{hyperref}
 > ...
 > 
 > This makes .dvi files with hyperlinks, which you can view 
 > with xdvik.   To make PDF out of the dvi,  I run "dvipdfm" 
 > on the .dvi file.
 > There may be a shorter way to generate PDF without going 
 > through dvi.  I can investigate, if people are interested.

On Linux I use the command pdflatex to generate pdf from TeX directly. I
don't know whether it makes use of dvi internally.

-MS